This and That Redux

I cannot think of anything worthy of a full rant, so I am going to run a series of mini-rants instead.  please be advised that the following comments are not in any descending order of importance. Some of these are truly trivial and some quite serious.

With all the hype about Butler Basketball, I was really pulling for Cornell.  Before Cornell played Kentucky it was revealed that the Wildcats coach made more in annual salary than Cornell spent on its entire basketball program!  Oh how nice it would have been for a real college program that recruits real student athletes to have made it to the final four.  Instead we got yet another preview of NBA talent auditioning for their next paying gig.

It sure made me feel great to know that while I am using Facebook, and thus supporting its highly profitable social network, so were the sub-human high school thugs in Massachusetts who bullied that little girl into committing suicide.  Hey Facebook, how about a little moderation of the content?  I cannot see how the media provider is relieved of all responsibility for the content it allows to be published.

While watching the recent child abuse scandals unfolding in the Catholic Church, I find it interesting that the Church's response is to close ranks around the institution, rather than aggressively pursue justice for those who have been victimized.  There is a lesson here for all of us who live among large and often old institutions.  Large bureaucracies rarely purge themselves of corruption and wrong doing, but instead try to insulate their hierarchy from criticism.  Perhaps we Catholics are on the verge of another Reformation. After all, it has been more than 500 years.

Attention all Republicans!  Enough already:  Barack Obama is NOT a liberal.  Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dennis Kucinich, and I are liberals.  If you are going to criticize the President, then at least be accurate.  Obama is continuing the Bush tax cuts for everyone making less than $250,000.  He has been even more aggressive than Bush was in pursuing the War in Afghanistan.  He NEVER was in favor of a public option in the Health Care Bill. He is the one who ordered the Navy to shoot and kill Somali pirates (the Bush strategy was to allow private shipping companies to pay ransoms).  He is continuing and expanding on Bush's education reform program.  He is aggressively pursuing a policy of off shore drilling and building nuclear power plants.  None of these are even close to being liberal!  Hey why not tell the truth, you don't like him because he is black, has a Middle East sounding name, and was born in Hawaii.  Go ahead say it, you will feel better about yourselves and the rest of us will respect your honesty, if not your sanity.  By the way, I am still waiting for your moral outrage about the members of the Republican National Committee hosting a fund raising event at an LA private strip club.  Not a peep from the usual nuts at Fox News.

Speaking of being liberal, is it radical to suggest that we ought to get our troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible?  Our latest strategy is to protect the people who grow opium so they will like us better than they like the Taliban.  And the latest from our ally, President Karzai. . . he now says that most of his problems are because of foreign troops being stationed in his country and if we don't stop telling him to root out the corruption in his government he might become a Taliban himself.  This guy makes all those stooges we propped-up in South Vietnam look like mini-Lincolns.  How many American lives need to be lost in support of a government that will fall as soon as we leave?  Just take a look at Iraq today as the sectarian violence and corruption are on the rise as American forces are preparing to leave.  Hmm, I think Saigon is still called Ho Chi Minh city today. Oh well, we sure can build cool monuments to our wars, whether they were worth fighting or not.

My fellow California citizens, to all of you who took advantage of a tax payer subsidized college education (as I did) then why are you now OK with your kids and grandkids paying ten times as much for the same privilege?  With all that our UC and CSU educations did for us, why can't we do as our parents did and support tax increases for higher education?  Maybe there is a reason our parents' generation has been called "The Greatest Generation."  What does that make us. . . The Entitled Generation?  Shame on us.  By the way, for every tax dollar spent on higher education, the state gets back four dollars in productivity and revenue.  Maybe a few less stops at Starbucks and few more dollars for education?

So what do you think?  Are my current students spending this Easter Break studying and preparing for their AP  and Final Exams?  Nah, me neither!